


Fifth Hausmate

by greenbucket



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Domestic Disputes, Gen, Housemates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 10:41:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19810603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbucket/pseuds/greenbucket
Summary: Fifth hausmate – whose name she still isn’t totes sure about but is possibly Erin or Erika or Eliza or something with an E – is giving Lardo like, the dirtiest look known to humankind.





	Fifth Hausmate

**Author's Note:**

> For Lardo Week 2019 day 1: beginnings

The first Lardo sees of the fifth hausmate is on a Sunday and it’s the door shut tight, lit up around the edges. Lardo’d only ventured into the basement to invite Ransom and Holster to play Mario Kart and get wrecked for the eighth time in two days, but the door makes her hesitate.

She hadn’t even realised the fifth hausmate had like, _moved in_. Even though Rans had shared the arranged deets with everyone and said it would be this weekend. She hasn’t gone anywhere other than down the road for emergency snack runs since Friday, though, so fifth hausmate must’ve been pretty sneaky about moving all her shit in.

That and the closed door are pretty solid signals: not in the mood to chat. Lardo can roll with that, even if her manager-brain is nudging her that this is a situation to be managed. She turns right to bang on Ransom and Holster’s doors instead.

-

The second time, it’s early morning and Lardo is both thoroughly fucking hungover and too nauseous to sleep. She’s curled up on the couch wrapped in the softest of Shitty’s hoodies she could find (while he was being a lucky, still-asleep asshole) and listening early morning chat shows on low volume; the combination is slowly, slowly healing her, but mother of fuck she feels ancient.

There’s also a woman Lardo has never seen before in the kitchen making breakfast but like, considering the reasons for and implications of that requires braincells Lardo really doesn’t have just then. Thankfully it’s nothing particularly strong-smelling or chunks would be blowing. She floats through an amount of space and time, really regretting everything, until she senses someone else in the room.

Fifth hausmate – whose name she still isn’t totes sure about but is possibly Erin or Erika or Eliza or something with an E – is giving Lardo like, the dirtiest look known to humankind. If fifth hausmate didn’t have the cutesiest home sweet home sign on her door and wasn’t currently wearing cupcake-patterned PJs, Lardo would be a little freaked.

“Morning?” Lardo croaks, in a hopefully friendly, conciliatory way. Fifth hausmate has dark shadows under her eyes and it’s only then that Lardo considers they’d maybe been kinda pretty loud getting back in last night. She’s not sure what fifth hausmate does but she’s out _a lot_ and probably likes her sleep when she can get it.

Fifth hausmate scoffs and replies, super acidic, “Yeah, it’s morning,” then stalks off into the kitchen. Lardo almost warns her there’s some stranger cooking in here; before she can she hears, in a tone about ten million times softer, fifth hausmate’s “Babe, I was going to make _you_ breakfast.”

Lardo isn’t so hungover that she can’t connect the dots. Also isn’t so hungover that she can’t feel a bit bad about lowkey interrupting fifth hausmate getting some. What Lardo is is just hungover enough that the breakfast is actually starting to smell really good. She kinda wants to ask if she can get in on it, but – luckily for the state of fifth hausmate-everyone else relations – she’s too hungover to actually get up from the couch.

-

The third time, Lardo is painting her toenails at the kitchen table because it has the best lighting. Shitty has submitted to one hand being done as a warmup while he reads through some dry as shit legalese, even though Lardo knows he’ll scratch it all off by tomorrow, and Ransom and Holster are arguing noisily about whose turn it is to clean their bathroom. Fifth hausmate is silently scrubbing a pot which had already been left to soak with an air of grim determination.

“It is _literally_ not my turn to do it,” says Holster, opening the fridge and then closing it again for no apparent reason.

“Bro, it _literally_ is,” says Ransom, turning to the cleaning rota he’d taped to the fridge. It’s been AWOL for at least two weeks but Lardo lets Ransom realise that himself. “Dude. Did you throw out the cleaning rota so you wouldn’t have to clean the bathroom?”

“Brah,” says Shitty, without looking up. Lardo knows that brah; it’s the ‘seems a little pretty fucking unreasonable, don’t you think?’ brah.

Holster expresses a similar sentiment by replying at a volume like, just slightly below yelling, “Are you seriously suggesting I stole the rota, bro?”

There is a part of Lardo, in all legit honesty, that does sometimes love to rile Ransom and Holster up. Like, for starters, she’s not going to remind them that they were the ones that took down the cleaning rota because they wanted to chuck paper airplanes down the basement stairs.

Except Lardo also can’t help but notice the way Holster’s booming has fifth hausmate’s shoulders rising inch by irritated inch. And she can’t help thinking about the fact that fifth hausmate has to share that rank bathroom with Ransom and Holster, too.

“Maybe I just won’t clean it either until _someone_ finds the rota, then,” Ransom is saying, now doing his own version of the pointless fridge opening routine. Maybe it’s a stress reliever.

“Ransy, why the fuck would I hide the rota? I know I’m right.”

“ _Brah_ ,” says Shitty again. It’s the ‘oh, dude, now you’ve done it’ kind this time.

“You _know_ you’re _right_?” Ransom repeats. He’d started angrily and incorrectly watering their row of window hausplants but stops to give the derisive look he’s directing at Holster his full focus. “You just know, of course, sure you do. Except everyone else could also ‘know’ that you’re ‘right’ if you hadn’t taken the rota down.”

Fifth hausmate has stopped scrubbing her lost-cause pot and at a glance Lardo can see her jaw is supes clenched. Shitty is the bro to take charge of stuff like this, but he doesn’t pick up on the details like that early enough. Lardo does; she takes it as her cue.

“Dudes,” Lardo says. The kitchen falls silent. It’s kinda good to know she’s still got it. “Remember you have to share that bathroom with…”

The quiet stretches, suddenly less one of respect and more of awkwardness. Yikes. Lardo perhaps has got it less than she thought. She’s stuck half-gesturing over to fifth hausmate, caught out as having no fucking clue what her name is.

“Erin,” fifth-hausmate-Erin helpfully supplies once she realises she’s being included in the conversation.

“With Erin,” Lardo continues, “so maybe you should just clean that shit together and call it even.”

With much grumbling but a little cowed by the realisation that fifth hausmate (Erin!) exists and halfway to a best-friends-activate joy-and-rainbows spree anyway, Ransom and Holster head off to clean the bathroom. Shitty absentmindedly kisses a fingertip and presses it against Lardo’s face in a thanks that doesn’t require him looking up from his work. Lardo carries on painting her nails and Erin goes back to scrubbing her pot.

It’s quiet for a while, or as quiet as it gets with the sounds of scrubbing, Shitty humming to himself, and Ransom and Holster bickering downstairs.

“Hey,” says Erin, and Lardo is so unaccustomed to hearing her speak that she almost doesn’t look up. When she does, it’s even weirder, because Erin is like, almost smiling at her. Lardo’s pretty sure she’s never smiled at any of them before.

“Sup.”

“Thanks for that,” she says, smile actually becoming a smile.

“No thanks needed,” Lardo settles on as the easy, hausmately response. “I couldn’t even remember you’re name so like, thanks extra not needed.”

Erin shrugs. “Still.”

Lardo just about manages not to roll her eyes. She won’t stand for any kind of self-depreciating attitude like that in her Haus 2.0, and they may not have got off to the best of beginnings as hausmates but now the barrier is broken Erin is included in that. “Seriously, don’t accept me or anyone else being a dick.”

Shitty nods sagely. “Sing it.”

Erin shrugs again, turns back to her pot. “Well, thanks anyway,” she says, “especially since it was actually my turn to clean the bathroom.”


End file.
